Also, Mao was not highly favored by Stalin in the 1930s; Stalin getting rid of him one way or another before Mao took effective control that made this difficult and impolitic later would be possible. I suspect a very big reason Mao took over was that in following Stalin's instructions, Stalin's handpicked leaders tended to get killed off by the KMT; the Maoists were the faction left standing due to taking their own counsel rather than obeying orders from the Kremlin. So Stalin didn't have much left to work with against him by the time he emerged as the heir apparent to Chinese Communism.
So yet another way to butterfly Mao, if not by killing him then by keeping him marginal within the Party, might be to have less of Stalin's high-handed and self-serving interference in the Chinese Party. We could butterfly away Stalin's rule in turn, or tie his hands so that the International is not under his control, or just change his personality a bit so that he's more interested in seeing progress and results from Red movements overseas than in making damn sure whatever their level of fortune or misfortune, they are obedient to himself. Then perhaps completely different people killed off OTL lead the Chinese Party. In these circumstances Mao himself might hold somewhat different views--though I bet his brand of radicalism was pretty fundamentally based on his basic personality and deep world views, so he'd probably always be a leftist radical in any TL.